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Intermittent Win2K Pro startup problem

M

MonoJoker

Junior Member
Having this problem randomly on boot. I don't reboot the machine very often as Win2K seems mighty stable for me. But when I do (about 50% of the time) I get a message that "the [winnt]\system32\ntoskernel file is missing or corrupt, please reinstall it". Now I know the file is there. If I run the fixboot command from the recovery console it sometimes fixes the problem and I get a successful boot. Other times if I simply reboot it boots fine. Can anyone suggest what might be going on? I'm worried it will only get worse.
 
I think the only time I get that message is when I am trying to overclock... I may be right but sometimes, switching DIMMS can help there too, right? I know on my MB if I use dimm2 at 117FSB, my computer won't boot into win2k, but with the mem in dimm1 at 117FSB, it works just fine.
 
Hi Mucman,

This is on a standard Compaq Deskpro PII 450 with 96MB of Compaq PC100 SDRAM. There is no overclocking or indeed any modifications from standard apart from the addition of 2 SCSI adapters. Have applied SP1 but that hasn't affected the problem.

Do you think there might be a problem with a faulty CPU or the RAM perhaps?
 
I've seen similar boot problems before on systems that had something wrong with the boot.ini file, like a deleted "default=" entry or an inaccurate ARC path.

When the default entry is missing the computer will display "NT (default)" as a boot menu choice, and it will use

multi(0)disk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

as the ARC path. If the NT system is not where the system expects to find it, the computer will fail to boot and give the missing ntoskrnl.exe message.

Is anyone or anything messing with your boot.ini file? I have seen some pretty weird stuff happen with boot.ini files, particularly when there was some arcane parsing problem caused by a non-ASCII character embedded somewhere in the file.

BTW, when using the repair system files option in NT4 you have to remember to reapply the service pack. I have heard rumors, but have seen no real evidence, that this may also be true with W2K. System File Protection in W2K is supposed to eliminate the need to do this, of course.

Hope you solve the mystery, and let us know what was causing the behavior.

Regards,
Jim
 
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